Friday, February 22, 2008

Ask Coriel: PvP Gear from PvE

I wanted to know your opinion on PvP gear available from PvE Raids. I know we don't see exactly eye to eye on the PvP gear, but the latest changes are a turn on from the interesting to the bizarre.

1) The blue gear available via rep is a great step forward to balance the 0-200 resilience race, helping both recent 70s and raiders switching to focus PvP.

2) The T4/T5/T6 tokens will now allow to pick up PvP gear. This change does seems strange. I'm still trying to decide if it's a good change or not. I'm leaning on the not-good side as only particular pieces are better than their raiding counterparts and it gives raiders the edge on the other side of the fence, which is the argument against PvP gear availability. ;-)

I think Blizzard is trying to make it easier for people to participate in both PvP and PvE. Currently, gearing up for either takes a lot of time, and if you really want to do both, you have to spend twice the time.

Since the introduction of S1 gear from battlegrounds, you can use PvP gear in PvE. It's not the best stuff, but sheer ilevel allows it to be decent. S1 isn’t as good as T4, but it’s better than a lot of blue gear.

These moves just allow people to go the other way. If you spend time running 5-mans, you can get some initial resilience gear. It’s not as good as running battlegrounds for S1, but it’s better than nothing.

Similarly, for the high-end people (Raiding or Arenas), S3 isn’t as good as T6 for raiding and extra T5/T6 tokens turn into S2, not S3. You get gear so you can participate, but are a step behind the people who choose PvE or PvP as their main activity. As well, extra tokens can get turned into gear, instead of being wasted.

It should also help out hybrid classes, as it will make it easier to pick up some PvP off-spec gear. The only specs which will need a little extra help are Protection warriors and Protection paladins, as there really isn’t any PvP gear or playstyle that is suitable for them.

All in all, it’s a pretty good move by Blizzard to get more people involved in both facets of the game.

Since I couldn't find any indication that PvE gear will be available from PvP vendors, I then seriously wondered "What is Blizz thinking?!" I mean, I'm already reading enough on blogs and forums alleging Blizzard's 'favoritism toward raiders' and that 'casuals subsidize raiding'. Why did Blizz play right into that by opening one-way access from PvE raiding to PvP, but not the other way around? Or is this some sort of reverse-psychology way to try to get people who PvP into raids... to get their PvP gear more easily than in actual PvP?!

So needless to say, at first Blizz confused me on this one. Faction rep vendors selling the old High Warlord stuff sounded kind of weird, and raiding for PvP gear seemed to make little sense unless Blizz did something reciprocal like making PvE Badge gear available through PvP vendors.

But looking at the 'big picture' of the 2.3 and PTR 2.4 changes, Blizz seems to be blowing open the doors on gear chases; surely just about everyone can be happy chasing the time sink that fits their taste with leet loot beckoning at the end -- until WotLK really feels imminent, anyway.

I would guess that the longer-range purpose of this patch 2.4 change is to nudge the raiders towards the Arena and BGs with this last TBC patch, remembering that patch 2.0 essentially killed WoW 1.0 raiding. Back then, PvP was the 'bridge' that kept raiders from cancelling between WoW patch 2.0 and TBC release. Worked once, should work again, right?

Actually, I see his point. In a similar sense that a player who PvEs primarily would have "extra" tier tokens that they can use to get some entry level PvP gear, a player who PvPs primarily would have "extra" honour/arena points that they can use to get some entry level PvE raiding gear (IE, Badge of Justice gear).

I don't really see this requiring additional time any more then having tier tokens give PvP gear does.

Honor / Arena points never really struck me as the sort of thing that you got extra of. You'd have to have *full* S3/Vindicator before that happens, and I'm not really sure that is that common. Maybe at the really high end.

Not like tokens, where some tokens come from an earlier boss that you've been killing for longer than a later boss, or if you've gotten a streak of specific tokens.

Now, one thing I could see is trading WSG/AV/AB/EotS tokens for Badges of Justice. You usually end up with a lot of excess battleground tokens while getting the necessary honor for items. Currently, the only real sink for these tokens are the PvP mounts, and really, how many mounts do you need? Badges of Justice (at a sufficiently high exchange rate--maybe 5 of each token, 20 in total) would be a good sink for excess BG tokens.

I was about to disagree with the "Token for Token" ide, because it seem as a cheap way of getting BoJ's , but it makes sense at that level of exchange. 5 marks of almost any BG can be obtained under 2 hours, but 5 of each BG requires more time to accumulate (especially from the Valley where they Sing of War).